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Farmers' Market Price Reports
110 Plays1 year ago
Join us as we dive into farmers' markets price reports, exploring both historical and current data and information. We will be taking a deeper dive into the fact sheet, 3-year Average Weekly Prices at Kentucky Farmers Markets: 2021-2023. Tune in to gain valuable insights that could guide the way you approach pricing at your local farmers' market.
3-year Average Weekly Prices at Kentucky Farmers Markets: 2021-2023
KY Farmers Market Price Reports
Questions/Comments/Feedback/Suggestions for Topics: hortculturepodcast@l.uky.edu
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Transcript
Introduction to Hort Culture Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to Hort Culture, where a group of extension professionals and plant people talk about the business, production and joy of planting seeds and helping them grow. Join us as we explore the culture of horticulture. All right. Hello, we're here. We're caffeinated. We're welcoming you.
Money and Horticulture: An Unusual Dive
00:00:20
Speaker
And thanks for joining us today. And we have not had our normal 20 minutes of
00:00:26
Speaker
chitter chatter, spill the tea beforehand. So don't be surprised to hear some of that now because we're rolling right in because we're excited and talking about money today, which is fun. When Drake said, all I care about is money in the city that I'm from, he might've been a local food advocate that people do not realize.
00:00:49
Speaker
I think maybe that's what he was referencing. He's a guy's, listen, he's been really holding on to that one. I was very excited about it. I just occurred to me right as we hit record. Yeah, he's been working on it for days. He's like, this is my time. This is my moment. But now I am on one. All I do is win, baby. A little Rudolph in there. There you go.
Spring Planting Concerns
00:01:14
Speaker
So yeah, we're talking about prices today. But before we jump into that, I mean, we're, you know, this is springtime.
00:01:23
Speaker
How is the, how's the seed starting and, and propagation and other things going on over, uh, any bulbs come, we got a lot of bulbs up. I've been pulling, I listened to listen to that episode about frost protection and realized I should probably frost protect some things in our cold and plant late. A lab Lexus or one of you guys, uh, mentioned, you know, there's certain seating dates and add a week or two to that. And that's what I do. I have not.
00:01:48
Speaker
seeded my tomato plants yet, but I could have done so eight to 10 days ago in our neck of the woods, but I am waiting. Put your bulbs in a week late in the fall. So they come up a week late in the spring. Sure. That's exactly how it works. That's exactly. Yeah. I'm doing some, uh, crate lilies, experimenting with them in some like big double lilies and crates this year and getting them for mother's day. So I had planted them, you know, in like February, uh, and they're inside the greenhouse and they are,
00:02:16
Speaker
freaking huge and they have not said buds and I'm like, are they supposed to be this big? Because I've never had, like they are three and a half foot tall already and they have no buds on them and they're not supposed to be ready until Mother's Day and I'm starting to panic a little bit. I'm like, I feel like this is too much. I feel like this is too much. And they're only in a couple inches of soil. I don't know. I think I've over loved them. I'm concerned about the, oh,
00:02:45
Speaker
Alright, I have there is a glitch in the matrix. I have this because I really honestly got thought I was losing my mind last night like it was one of those, you have your hands on your forehead and you're just kind of like, what rolling around on the ground
Mysteries in the Garden: Missing Plants
00:02:58
Speaker
screaming. Yeah, basically, I listen, I have a whole tray.
00:03:03
Speaker
of white lysianthus, which is a flower if you've never seen them looking them up, they're beautiful, missing. And I know they have existed on my farm because I have, I potted up a handful of them and I pulled some out to give to somebody yesterday morning and they are gone. Like there's not even a place where they would have been. Like it's completely full. There's no, there's no empty space where they're missing. Have you ever, have you ever read House of Leaves, Alexis?
00:03:31
Speaker
Uh-uh. Okay. Do I need to? No, it just, it reminds me of the, it's messes with spatial things. So like the dimensions of the house in the book, it's sort of like an, I would say call it a postmodern horror, uh, novel. Is it like the Harry Potter moving staircases? Uh, not exactly. They come alive.
00:03:51
Speaker
But the dimensions of the outside of the building, they measure the house, and it is shorter than the dimensions inside the house. Oh, cool, yeah. And it's like a spatial kind of, it reminded me maybe that you have a greenhouse of arms, for instance. There's a wormhole. Something has happened. I sent my husband out to look for them to be like, OK, maybe I'm just overlooking them. I mean, they're just gone. They don't exist anymore. And then it's not like you put something in your pocket and you walk away with it. It's a whole tray of plants.
00:04:19
Speaker
I feel like I would have known if I moved them somewhere. And where would I move them? Why would I move them? They're not with the other ones. I'm sorry. Maybe they were consumed by your crate trained lilies. You know what? Now that you put it that way. Yeah. They're getting clearer. Yet again, your success is your greatest weakness. My greatest weakness is I'm so strong. I am so good.
00:04:47
Speaker
But propensity for success has been haunting me my whole life. There's a specter haunting Brett. It is success. It is Brett's success. It is relentless. It hunts him relentlessly. You can tell who's caffeinated and who's not today. I am not caffeinated. Brett's hanging back, not sure about whatever else. They're fading into their shrubbery. They're talking about prices and they're talking about missing plants.
Pricing at Farmers Markets: Newbie and Veteran Queries
00:05:14
Speaker
Yeah. Well, we are about to start into farmer's market season and a lot of the folks who are out there listening who have started things or have started plants that they hope to maybe sell some of the produce from, whether that be fruits or leaves or some other, the root, other forms that we tend to sell stuff in. And one of the things that I would say at the center that we get asked a lot about by new vendors, by more experienced vendors is about this pricing question.
00:05:43
Speaker
And so if you're not familiar with the Center for Crop Diversification, that's where Josh and I work. It's part of the UK Cooperative Extension Service. And we have a website and a lot of other, and on that website are a lot of resources, publications, maps, all kinds of good stuff. The most popular resources we have by far
00:06:03
Speaker
In terms of the number of downloads and the number of people who know us for it are our price reports. And so we have farmer's market price reports from Kentucky and Tennessee. Historically, we had them from Illinois and Indiana and West Virginia, but all of those programs lost funding or lost the person who was doing. They didn't lose them. They moved on to something else.
00:06:26
Speaker
They faded away, but we do still do Kentucky and Tennessee prices that we post every week during the season. Generally speaking, mid to late April through about Halloween is when we do pricing. And a couple years ago, sorry, go ahead. Oh, I was just going to say, Brad, and this is a plug for you guys, Brad, everybody that works on these price reports and farmers market vendors know this, but they may not think about it. But I know that these are difficult to put together because it's amazing to me that
00:06:53
Speaker
You know, the work that you guys put into this because of all the variants among vendors, among markets, among locations, and just how vendors sell things. It's amazing. And I've always enjoyed these and I enjoy the thought that goes into these just because it's just not as easy to say it's going to be a bushel of apples. Oh no, sometimes it's a single apple or a pound of apples or a pack of apples by volume or by.
00:07:19
Speaker
So I appreciate the work that goes into these. I know a lot of work goes. They are a frustrating data source to collect. Not just for me, but for the reporters who do it, for anybody who's tried to do it and we have been, our group has been doing them since 2004 in some capacity. The number of markets has grown a decent amount since like back in 2004, it was like maybe one or two markets would report for the whole year.
00:07:49
Speaker
Since I've been doing them since 2015, we've grown up to where our peak is around, I don't know, 16 or 18 markets reporting at any given moment, just depends on the year and a little bit of backslide since COVID. But we still do regularly have 10 plus markets, you know, during the peak of the season.
Variability in Market Prices Across Counties
00:08:09
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it's really is what it sounds like. Uh, you, you can go to this report and you can see in Fayette County in Boone County and in Henderson County on a given day, what did you said apples? What did you know, a pound of apples sell for all kinds of variability and all kinds of other fun things to contend with, with those, those prices, but.
00:08:35
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's some more nuance we can talk about later on. But one of the crazy ideas that I had back when I realized we have all this data, all these data, was to take and maybe combine them into some average prices to get some more generalizable, useful information for folks at a glance to see where things are headed or what historically have been the prices, whatever. So we have this
00:09:02
Speaker
three-year price report, our publication that we put out late last year, maybe, yeah, December of 2023. This is the fact sheet, CCDFS29 for those megafans of the CCD out there. The publication number heads of which I am one. That's right. The first 100 copies, the picture was holographic and all the text was in Japanese. Limited edition.
00:09:31
Speaker
But no, so yeah, we put out this publication. It's the one with the carrots on the front. And maybe we could just talk through some of the aspects of this. I think for me, one of the questions I'd like to hear from the agent slash business slash other, you know, extension outreach stuff, like what are the value of these prices or how do you think people can, should think about using them? How do you use pricing in your work? Well, I guess,
00:10:02
Speaker
You can't use it for as a very, you know, specific prescription. And, you know, when we go and you guys have done a good job of that in the publication, you tell, you know, you give some tips and some guidelines on how to use it, but you also more importantly give guidelines on how not to use a report. And that's very useful to me. And I know it's useful to.
00:10:24
Speaker
producers, it's not a shortcut. It's just a piece of information that provides guidance. And I really like the way that you guys preface that. And another aspect of this that's specifically very helpful to my producers is that I'm in a more rural county. It's a smaller county with a smaller population, very agrarian, but our county butts up against Fayette County, which is a much, much more urban county with a large urban population.
00:10:51
Speaker
So we have producers that sell in a rural, both in a rural market and an urban market. And the way that you guys have broken down these price reports, it's very helpful, I know, to my producers that use this document because you differentiate, don't you guys, between the urban and rural markets. And it's sometimes striking some of the general trends that you see from the information on pricing structures in, let's say, the more urban markets. And my producers have used that to great effect.
00:11:20
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of interesting. There's dynamics, sometimes different dynamics within the urban and rural markets. Generally speaking, the prices at urban markets tend to be higher than the prices at rural markets. Generally speaking, the fees to be a vendor at those urban markets are also higher. And so there's a certain trade off there, the transportation costs and other things associated with that.
00:11:46
Speaker
But the other dynamic that's kind of interesting is you'll see certain commodities or certain crops where once the rural gardens come in, the price plummets at marketing. Tomatoes, yeah. They're basically, we're trying to give them away on the sidewalk at a certain point in the season seems like.
00:12:05
Speaker
Yeah. And so there is that dynamic that's kind of interesting to see in some of the charts. And so as you go through the report, it's broken up into individual crops. I think we do 17 or 18 crops from our reports. And there are line graphs that give three-year average prices as they change across the season for urban and for rural markets.
00:12:27
Speaker
Yeah, that to me is one of the more, that's an interesting characteristic that what is allowed by this is the comparison of historic and current or following it through the season. That's a very nice kind of visual bit of information about, you know, this is how the prices trend. And sometimes the urban and rural markets don't aren't completely like it's not necessarily one to one in terms of, you know, the urban market starts first or the price point starts really high in the urban market. And then
00:12:57
Speaker
You know, as you say, like the, the rural market comes on and brings it down. Um, really fascinating that kind of temporal and kind of geographic comparison. I've also been interested how, and we may not be far enough into the data set at this time or the historical data to tell this, but as time progresses forward and more and more people we've spoken about.
Market Trends: Urban vs Rural Pricing
00:13:21
Speaker
a lot of producers here in Kentucky are getting high tunnels or have high tunnels. But I'm very curious over time if we see those price points being pushed back a little bit because crops can be produced earlier. And I'm very curious as time goes by if we see any, that's why these historical or more look over time, multiple years, is interesting to me as we go forward. If protected agriculture changes the pricing structure,
00:13:50
Speaker
based on timing. I'm real curious about that. It's interesting because the, the farmer's market dynamic is very different. So, so we also offer price reports for produce auctions, which are these larger, they're what I would describe as kind of the local version of a wholesale terminal market. So you can take and bring your crops and they're sold at that place from, from, you know, by this broker auction at auction, they're sold to buyers who then take them all over the,
00:14:19
Speaker
probably the Southeast actually. We see larger and larger buyers bringing larger and larger vehicles and auction prices have soared, especially through the pandemic. But if you look at those price graphs across time, so we have three-year averages available for those as well. If you look at those price graphs, they follow the normal kind of seasonal distribution that you would expect, which is to say,
00:14:44
Speaker
They are a big smiley face, not the eyes, but just the mouth. So they start high when the supply is low in the spring. As the glut of product comes on, the prices go way down. And then as the season tapers off and those things become rarer again, the price goes back up.
00:15:02
Speaker
Farmer's markets, it's all over the place. And there's a tendency to set and retain a set price the whole season that I'm selling tomatoes for $3 a pound on day one, and I'm selling them on the last day of the season.
00:15:19
Speaker
Yeah, you know whenever I have them and even as we've seen we have seen some of the creep of the high tunnel production push push those start dates back and those Available dates back and even there the those the way that I would logic through it. I don't know if it's true I haven't confirmed this with any interviews or anything like that, but I think a lot of folks see the advantage of
00:15:45
Speaker
capturing and establishing a relationship with a producer, I'm sorry, with a customer early in the season so that they continue to come back to you throughout the course of the season. So it's just sort of this longer term, not exactly a loss leader, but as we know from previous conversations, the seasonal high tunnel extension, season extension through high tunnels and other things has additional costs, labor costs, very bizarre to see.
00:16:12
Speaker
And you guys mentioned that in here because you have to, you can't use this as a price prescription because everyone has their own input cost. And so I wondered how protected agriculture, you know, like high tunnels, that adds cost and overhead if they're getting a price premium, but it may take a lot more, you know, it may take some more time to kind of pull that out. But I've been really curious about that too, because the first thing you want to do, you can't set a price until you know your own input cost and
00:16:38
Speaker
what you have to have for the product. I see that I tend to work backwards a lot when I'm thinking of crops and when I'm helping growers think of crops. And so this would be a great way to look at something and say, okay, if this is an average for a rural market, if that's where I'm at for asparagus,
00:16:56
Speaker
then i'm working backwards to say well what can i grow asparagus for and you know figuring it out that way and granted you know there's always different ways you can set your prices and stuff but it keeps you from having nothing you know there's there's something out there that even though it might not be perfect because it's an average and it's not exactly your market
00:17:17
Speaker
It's something to go off of that you can at least start to think about, okay, well, is growing lettuce going to be beneficial for me? Well, maybe it's beneficial to grow lettuce. If you're growing it, you could figure out how to do it in the summer because, you know, there's not a ton of people, but can you make up the money to install the misters that you're going to have to do to keep the temperature down for lettuce or whatever that is? So like, I could see it as being very valuable to work backwards as you think of new crops as well.
00:17:44
Speaker
Not always where, okay, I grow this, now what do I sell it for, type of thing. And so I can see a cool way. You approach it from what the market will bear, which is another way of doing that is reverse engineering the price. Or deciding, like, even if you are already growing stuff and you're thinking about doing a different market, you know, you can look at this rural versus urban and say like, okay, well, you know, it's going to cost me $1,000 to get into the farmer's market in an urban area, and it's $150 for a rural area.
00:18:12
Speaker
But is that price difference going to be worth it for the amount of pounds I plan to have? And so I think that can be really helpful when you're wanting to expand your market or can you afford to send someone to multiple markets type of thing. There's so many different ways to use something like this more than just like, well, I got to sell my garlic for $2 because that's what it says on here.
00:18:35
Speaker
I've had some people use this and they take this information. They've compared it with the fees charged by any given market to see if it's worth selling actually through a farmer's market. And that helps them decide if they want to go the roadside stand or direct farm market route. And I guess that's just a piece of the puzzle for certain producers is they take a look to see, get a rough ideal of what certain markets get on average and
00:19:06
Speaker
Sometimes they've decided they can do better on their own. I don't know how that turned out, but it's, uh, this is guys, this is just looking at farmer's markets,
Diverse Marketing Channels in Horticulture
00:19:14
Speaker
correct? Not like, okay. And it's, it's important to realize that there's a lot of different marketing channels. Of course, I think of farmer's market markets first here in Kentucky, you know, that's a popular, you know, direct to consumer channel, but there's other channels, but that's, that's part of, you know, the discovery process of finding out what's best for you. And Alexis was sort of touching on some of that.
00:19:36
Speaker
I think just to follow up on that point, I think one of the things that I say quite frequently when I go out and talk to groups or when I have an opportunity to be either on a video or podcast or whatever elsewhere.
00:19:51
Speaker
You go to other podcasts? I am traitor. Please me? What? I'm not monogamous. Podmonogamous? Podmonogamous. Yeah, I don't know.
00:20:08
Speaker
I tend, I tend to say to people like you probably should be charging more. So even the prices that are in these reports, we don't, these aren't like Brett's, you know, recommended prices for 2024. In fact, many times they're low. I have experienced growers who will make comments about how they don't even reference the reports anymore. They were helpful before, but like all the prices are just too low based on what they're offering, what they're selling.
00:20:34
Speaker
and what their customers will accept. I've had other examples where someone, one of our price reporters used the price reports that she helped to assemble. She was looking at green onions. We report the prices for green onions and they had been selling the green onions for a dollar a bunch at their market since who knows when. And she looked around and all of the other markets, literally all of them were selling for a minimum of $2 a bunch.
00:21:02
Speaker
She approached the group and different markets make arrangements about pricing and undercutting and other things on their own terms, approached them and said, we need to raise our prices. They raised their prices on green onions to $2 a bunch instead of a dollar, and they still sold out.
00:21:18
Speaker
And so there was money left on the table probably for several years at that point. If people don't bat an eye when you change a price, that means that you are not even... I'm not saying you should gouge your customers, but you are approaching the limit of what they would start to accept. And if you don't have anybody complaining about the price or anybody giving any sort of feedback on it, that means that you're not really at the
00:21:40
Speaker
limit of what the value of what your product is, that putting aside all the cost considerations, which again, I think if people really put pen to paper on their costs. But to hammer home what two things that both Ray and Alexis that you all were saying in the rural versus urban considerations and is it worth going to an urban market just to put some hard numbers on it. So in this, this price report considered prices from 2021, 22 and 23.
00:22:10
Speaker
and it averaged them, but we were able to do some other secondary analysis and there'll be more publications coming out. In the year 2021, on average, urban prices were higher than rural prices by 24.6%. So they were almost a quarter times as many higher, almost 25% higher. In 2022,
00:22:32
Speaker
urban prices were higher than rural prices by 35%. And that number grew in 2023 to almost 40%. So prices at urban markets were almost 40% higher than rural markets were in 2023. And that's across all commodities. So that's a significant premium. And that's one where, you know, 40%, you can start to think about, and I do about potentially changing markets. And that drive doesn't seem as daunting as it did before.
00:23:01
Speaker
But I think that also points to a potential upcoming crisis, and I'm not the only one who's mentioned, who's talked about this, but a potential upcoming crisis for our rural markets. If they're not able to offer a profitable platform for producers to sell at, that means that that local source of product, which is really important for communities in a number of ways might end up vanishing
00:23:29
Speaker
And I would hate to see if that was the case just because people aren't charging enough and they could be charging a little bit more. There's no kinds of implications with WIC and SNAP and other things that can be pulled into that conversation, but it is a really interesting one and one that we're really glad to be able to see from these hard to get, but useful, really useful data.
00:23:50
Speaker
Just to clarify, like what you're saying is that, you know, you'd hate to see it if these rural markets could indeed charge higher prices that are closer to what the urban markets are paying and that people would leave to go sell in urban markets to receive a higher price point when they didn't necessarily need to. Or that could be something going on behind the scenes.
00:24:14
Speaker
I'm saying I think rural markets suffer from voluntarily underpricing their products more than urban markets do. And if they are sort of doing that preemptively without unnecessarily like an eye to the consumer doesn't actually would be willing to pay more in order to have that thing remain. But I think just bluntly,
00:24:35
Speaker
We see a lot of producers move away from rural markets, whether they move to urban market or they just move to other sales channels. It just becomes difficult for them to either the volume or the price becomes difficult for them to.
00:24:46
Speaker
I gotcha. To justify, and that would be, yeah. So, hence, my gospel of price, charge more for your products that gets daggers shot from eyes around the room often when I go to- Yeah, I've been there when you said that, and I'm like, y'all should be clapping for that, but okay. Clap for me. Clap for me. Please clap. How did you all define a rural versus an urban market? And I asked because the county I'm in
00:25:13
Speaker
I don't know, it's kind of weird. It's rural, but it's not. I'm just curious on how you all kind of define that. Generally, it's proximity to a large population center. And there was another criteria that we used. I mean, to be honest, there's a part of it, the initial consideration that's just sort of based on vibe, knowing the state and knowing the places. And it's definitely contentious because in a state like Kentucky, especially the lines between rural and
00:25:44
Speaker
Yeah. That's a thing like people study and like social science and geography is like, well, what's the difference? And aren't they part of the same thing? But I, am I correct in that? Like the urban markets are defined. That's like the Fayette County markets. Yeah. Boone County stuff like that. And probably Jefferson. Yep. Yep. Anything that's in close proximity. And so there's some things,
00:26:11
Speaker
Like down in, um, we didn't, on this report, we didn't have Davis County included, uh, as far as Owensboro or, or, you know, bigger city down West. But that's kind of on a tipping point of question of whether that's an urban market or rural market. But generally I would say the pricing at those markets, now this is sort of a, you know, Chicken and egg thing.
00:26:35
Speaker
But the prices are actually, they kind of jump out at you, the difference between the urban and rural markets, and it also corresponds to the population centers. So yeah, generally it's that tri-city area of Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky, Lexington and Louisville. I had a producer make an interesting comment. We were talking about issues like this because we're in a situation where we have producers that sell to
00:26:59
Speaker
what I consider a rural market than an urban market as well. And they were like, well, the biggest difference is that my urban markets are not my neighbors. And I don't know if the price feedback that they received from their neighbors took on a larger role in their decision-making down the road. And there's a lot of psychology that goes into that, I think. And there's so many factors. That was an interesting conversation with this person because they received feedback from their urban market because they did not personally know and grow up with
00:27:28
Speaker
for the most part, those folks in an urban area. So they took feedback from customers more objectively. But it seems like when they would talk about feedback from their hometown where they're selling them, their small hometown that they grew up in, it's like that every little bit of feedback took this monumental position in their mind, whether or not it was objective.
00:27:50
Speaker
And I just wonder how much impact that had on them pricing their goods lower in their hometown. I know there's a lot going on there to unpack.
Rising Costs in Agricultural Production
00:27:58
Speaker
I would imagine so. And something else is like, you know, when we think about figuring out the cost of production, the cost of production of your agricultural system is kind of a tricky thing to figure out. Whereas if you're
00:28:11
Speaker
Taking that product that you could either sell at your local market or drive into an urban center, you know, the cost difference kind of much easier, right? It's your gas cost to get there. It's the fee for the farmer's market. And you know, like you need to recapture that, right? Like the cost is easier to understand kind of intuitively when you are traveling from
00:28:33
Speaker
a rural community to an urban market to kind of get that higher price. But I think your neighbor thing is probably also feeding into it, right? And that also kind of goes back to something that Brett had talked about, like the way the auctions price points sort of change throughout the season and availability and volume.
00:28:51
Speaker
Whereas they consistent, stay more consistent in the farmer's market. And I mean, you know, if you go to the same guy to buy your berries or whatever, and the prices are kind of like bouncing around it, you know, that can be easier to kind of take that as like a transactional interaction than somebody who's, you know, your neighbor and that you're supporting. Yeah, that's kind of what I was getting. So just another, just another piece of data here for, to, to frame that.
00:29:21
Speaker
last part of the conversation for a second. And then I have a question or a prompt we can talk about. So from 2021 to 2023, the average price of all crops across all markets, just everything all in one big bag increased by 13.6%. So crops were 13 or products were 13.6% more expensive in 2013 than they were in 2021.
00:29:48
Speaker
and that's not inflation adjusted or anything like that. In many ways, it probably reflects inflation, but in the urban markets, that price increase was around 21%, whereas the average increase in the rural markets was closer to the overall average. In other words, the price in urban markets is going up more quickly than it is in rural markets. You're not always buying just the produce, and I wonder if this is where that factor comes in a little bit to play there, folks.
00:30:16
Speaker
We oftentimes say farmer's market is sort of a social institution as well as a nutrition institution. So there's this social aspect of it being a destination and an experience. And I'm not saying that's not the case in rural markets. I can't make that statement across the boards. But I know that there seems to be a lot of social aspects to the bigger markets in different states that I've traveled around to. The bigger the market, they have music there, they have kids activity.
00:30:43
Speaker
And they can and they're in areas that may or may not have. I'm just curious what the relationship is. But they may be in areas that have like a higher level of disposable income that gets into sociology. But I wonder about those factors of that being a destination as well as being in areas where price sensitivity is not as great.
00:31:02
Speaker
Well, on the neighbor's question, I do try to start a lot of my conversations with folks to ask, what is your purpose in selling at this farmer's market? Because we assume that everybody sells at a farmer's market to make money, but there are some people who don't. And that is a tricky thing to navigate if you have some people at a market who are there to make money and others who are there to just offset the costs of their retirement hobby.
00:31:27
Speaker
It causes lively conversation at the market. It's a funny little a question there but i would say you know if you are here to try to be in this economically sustainably for a while and be able to offer that social space and also that product to your neighbors.
00:31:43
Speaker
I would flip, I can't charge my neighbors that price on its head and to say, why is it that your neighbors can expect you to sell them that product at a loss to you? And so it kind of goes both ways and there's all kinds of philosophical and economic and other critical perspectives to explore that Josh and I would be happy to
00:32:05
Speaker
explore over and have over beers or some other drink at some point in the future. It's sort of a bald boys thing. So if you shave your head, you're in. They will go be over margaritas. How about that?
00:32:26
Speaker
Sounds good. You guys have fun and bring a comb, bring a comb or a brush or something. We won't. We will. Some like shampoo or whatever. Josh and I have origin stories in critical social sciences and other kinds of things, unlike these plant dorks.
00:32:46
Speaker
You know, we're and I especially am faking it till I make it as part of the Hort Culture podcast. But I have a question for you all. Oh, yeah. What's the deal with this like set pricing and floors and ceilings and do you all see it? I mean, we're not neither confirmed nor deny. Well, I mean, first of all, there are two different things. Some markets look at price ceilings, but more commonly ones I ran into will set a price floor
00:33:16
Speaker
because they ran into people that are more into it as a hobby and that it skews the floor like they're selling below cost. So this is internal to the market. There's a conversation. Internal to each individual market. And they say, we are going to set, you cannot sell a quart of strawberries for less than $5. Right. Exactly. And that seems simple enough. But then you get into these nuanced conversations of, well, mine's an heirloom tomato or an heirloom strawberry.
00:33:46
Speaker
And that gets more into the price ceiling. So there's all these little sub conversations that spin off of that. But I believe once it gets right back to it, it's because, you know, in a lot of cases, someone may be selling really, really just, you know,
00:34:03
Speaker
obviously too cheap for it to be sustainable. But then you talk to them and they're like, well, it's just a hobby for me. But what that does is skews the general public's value prospect of what they're paying for. It kind of messes with that.
00:34:18
Speaker
markets that I've been involved with, it's usually the price floor that gets the most discussion. But Alexis, I don't know, have you ever worked with any markets that have a price ceiling? Yeah, I sit on our local markets board and they do technically have a stipulation that the market manager can essentially ask you to raise your price. So there's not necessarily a
00:34:40
Speaker
minimum, like there's not a set minimum, but if everybody in the market selling for a dollar a pound and you're selling for 50 cents a pound, that's a big, big difference. And so there is a stipulation you agree to that you will not undercut, which is sometimes easier when you're dealing with like tomatoes, like, like Ray said, like there's like heirloom stuff to cut flowers is a really difficult one because
00:35:13
Speaker
I do think that something to think about, you know, when I've talked to
00:35:22
Speaker
When I go as an agent to the farmer's market and I'm, you know, an official attire and I have, you know, people will say to me, well, sell down there and sell in for whatever. Sometimes it's real. Sometimes it's way higher than them. Sometimes it's, you know, lower than them.
00:35:38
Speaker
And I think that there is something to say about it's not always bad to be the highest price at the market. As someone who has, yeah, as someone who has experience selling like a frivolity, so to speak, too. But even with food, I think it's okay. I think that people see value in it, right? At a more, sometimes a more expensive option, people will go to that because they think that there is value.
00:36:04
Speaker
there, even if there's not technically value there, you're probably pricing better and more as you should. But I think that there's something to be said. So even if everybody is pricing their tomatoes at 75 cents a pound, and you have the exact same tomatoes as them, but you want to price a dollar because you know that you need to make a dollar, I say go for it. You know what I mean? It's not always going to knock people off
00:36:30
Speaker
And you don't necessarily have to sell as much. Like that's the other thing too is, you know, if I sell 20 bouquets at $20, it's a lot easier on me than having to sell 40 bouquets at $10, right?
Customer Education and Pricing Strategies
00:36:43
Speaker
I have to do a lot less work.
00:36:46
Speaker
You're just training people. I mean, doing a little bit of training or a little bit of education, however you want to look at it. What if you sold one bouquet for $400? I mean, I'm working on it. You're not a volume leader, but you're a profit maker. Yeah. And so it's like there's something to say about that and then where you're marketing. So if people are coming to you and out to your farm to a flower stand or do a market stand and they're driving out of their way for just you, then maybe you don't want to price as high because they're
00:37:16
Speaker
you know, coming all the way to you to do that, you know, versus if they're going to a farmer's market, like store type situation or a farmer's market where they're coming for a social aspect, you might be able to price higher there and you would want to, right? Because you have to pay to be there and to pack all your crap up. So just something to think about. Yeah. I think Alexis, you're hitting so many good points about
00:37:41
Speaker
how to think about the pricing dynamic. I have never understood why anyone would ever set a ceiling at a market. I just don't follow any logic other than like... Anyone should have the right to do that. Yeah, that's bonkers to me. I've never even heard of that. It's like stamping down difference. I mean, if you believe in the market and you believe the prices should be low, then like,
00:38:01
Speaker
Why don't you let the market act and keep people in mind for me? Well, the other component you were bringing up I think is the aspect of marketing and differentiation. Because if you are going to take the time to physically go to set up, be at a farmer's market, spend that time, plus the booth costs, plus the et cetera, the product loss, all the other things that are going to happen in the course of that.
00:38:27
Speaker
And then you don't take the opportunity to differentiate yourself both with your price and with your messaging about how and why your product is special. You're just selling, you're doing all of the legwork of a direct market without differentiating it as a commodity. It's like not all tomatoes or tomatoes or tomatoes. This is a special tomato and here's why. And here's why it's priced at 450 a pound. And I think that works better in some markets than in others, but there is a certain aspect of like,
00:38:56
Speaker
If, if I am bringing you, if my marketing elsewhere is bringing you physically to the market to specifically buy from me, then I can kind of ask whatever I want. And other people who maybe are just there because the people know the farmer's markets there and then they show up and they want to buy a generic tomato and they haven't done any of the legwork to show why it's special or how it's different or whatever, why I'm special or why I'm different.
00:39:21
Speaker
Those are the folks that I think want to kind of set that price. And just briefly before I turn it over to Ray,
00:39:27
Speaker
Another way, if you're a listener who finds yourself in the situation of being part of a market who really doesn't want to deal with raising prices or have that conversation, I have found that the price reports can be a useful tool because it's sort of like a third party data source. It's like, look, it's not me saying this. It's this joker Brett from up at the Center for Crop Diversification is saying
00:39:51
Speaker
that we are giving our products away look at the price differences just a couple of counties over. We need to think about having this conversation to raise our prices or at least kind of allow allow me to or whatever so. I think but i think your spot on alexis that you know if you think if somebody's gonna come to you and you don't have all the logistical associate associated costs of transport and everything else.
00:40:12
Speaker
You might consider a premium there because it's easier for you to sell it that way. But if you're going to a farmer's market, there's a ton of costs associated with selling at a farmer's market in terms of time, everything else. So Ray, you were going to share a bit of trivia, I think. No, it's just something I observed and it was very powerful for me growing up that something that goes along with the conversation today and then I'll throw it over to Alexis.
00:40:35
Speaker
Is that it's the power of the consumer to be attentive to price in that I noticed that there's one person selling tomatoes alongside everyone else and there was no price floor there should have been but there wasn't and he's brought way too many tomatoes for the size of market.
00:40:49
Speaker
And every weekend he would, towards the last 45 minutes, he would slash the price of his tomatoes. And, you know, that started occurring on a regular basis. And what did customers started doing? They started waiting to shop until the last 45 minutes.
00:41:07
Speaker
So be careful of those self-fulfilling prophecies. We literally had a question and a training earlier this week of what do you think about Slasher prices at the end of the day? And Tim and I both said the same thing of like, you're just you're this is Pavlov's dog. You are ringing the bell. Ringing the bell. It's one of the things I learned earlier. Because they'll ask you every time, take that crap home, donate it, something like that. Yeah, donate it. Totally. And that's that's tough conversation, but it's a good one. But yeah.
00:41:37
Speaker
But I think, you know, I hope that this price information and price data reports are useful. I think based on the number of downloads and interests they are, they are imperfect data sets. And so we're collecting from a handful of markets across the state and the ones that report regularly are the ones that we include in these averages.
00:41:57
Speaker
And so, you know, I think any pricing data should be taken with a grain of salt as far as how to apply it to your situation, but it is a nice starting point to say, well, is a bundle of asparagus $4 or $14 or 45 cents? Well, it's in somewhere in that, you know, in that middle range there. Anytime we can get like a realistic reference point, I think it's helpful, but I would always encourage you to just look at this as the current going rate.
00:42:25
Speaker
consider your costs, consider whether or not you want to get into a market where the going rate is particularly low. It's okay to walk away from a crop and say, I just can't grow that profitably here. But use the prices and along with the other information to try and increase your profitability. And I think if you approach it in that way that this is additional information about the market, it can be really useful and helpful with your crop planning for the year and your market planning for the year.
00:42:54
Speaker
And if you don't know how to calculate your costs and sometimes that can get overwhelming and we're not judging you for that, we've all been there. You can call your local extension office and we can point you in the right direction. We can get you some helpful tools to make that happen to at least help you get in the ballpark of it. And that can be a big difference. I just wanted to point that out that there's no judgment there. Sometimes it's a lot harder to get started than one might think.
00:43:19
Speaker
Anyways, uh, I think we had a great talk today, keeping it, I wouldn't say short, where, you know, over 40 minutes and just kind of to the point precise. Yes. If you want to hear more about pricing, we can definitely go deeper on some of that at some point, if you want to do things like the leaders and the bulk pricing and the. All that kind of fun stuff.
Engage with Hort Culture on Instagram
00:43:39
Speaker
Shoot us an email. You'll find that down in our show notes. You can follow us on Instagram. You can send us a message over on there at hoard culture podcast.
00:43:48
Speaker
And I will check that out and relay that, which reminds me that we've got a message on YouTube look at and share with the bullies. But anyways, check us out there, leave us a review. You can even say, hey, I want to know more about pricing. Or if this was helpful for you, let us know in a review as you leave us five stars, because obviously. But thank you all for being with us today. We hope that as we grow this podcast, you will grow with us and that you will join us next week. Have a great one.